ADF outlines Great Falls expansion plans at open house

Several-dozen Great Falls business and political leaders were on hand Wednesday during the grand opening of ADF International's $26 million steel fabrication building just north of town.

Local officials said they were impressed both by the cavernous, high-tech facility and by plant general manager Dan Rooney's expectations for growth.

Rooney said the plant, which began operations in January after less than a year of construction, already employs about 80 people, with the average floor welder and facilitator making at least $15 or $16 an hour, with employee health benefits paid entirely by the Quebec-based company.

ADF expects to employ another 70 to 80 people in a second fabrication shift within six to eight months and has started work on a $6 million paint shop whose 40 employees will be able to do sophisticated painting jobs not only for the company but other western manufacturers.

It's due for completion early next year.

Rooney said ADF has 60 outside acres prepared on which up to 500 or 600 more workers could assemble fabricated steel and add piping, controls and insulation for modular parts of different sizes that can be shipped to oil fields and other projects. The number of employees working in those projects will depend on the size of contracts the company gets, he said.

Rooney, a Montana State University engineering graduate, said the company has found plenty of Great Falls-area and Montana job applicants with good skills willing to accept more training. He said the company has 1,000 good job candidates on a waiting list.

Assembling project modules makes more sense in areas like Great Falls, with a sufficient population base, rather than in scarcely populated northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the oil field production is, he said.

ADF CEO Jean Paschini said he chose Great Falls for the company's second state-of-the-art steel fabrication plant and only one out of Quebec, Canada, because of its strategic location close to major oil, gas and construction projects in the western United States and Canada and because of the great community support he encountered from local and state governments and economic developers.

Rooney said the company is finalizing a plan with state and federal governments to complete the final 45 miles of a "high and wide corridor" by raising 13 utility lines this summer on U.S. 87 between Great Falls and Fort Benton. The rest of the route north into Canada already is ready, meaning some super module loads as big as 24 feet wide, 24 feet long and 120 feet long can be moved more easily to Canada, without crossing the mountains of Idaho and western Montana, he said.

The company is optimistic about the improving U.S. economy, which could mean more construction projects, and the favorable outlook for the oil fields development in Canada, Rooney said.

Great Falls Development Authority President Brett Doney said ADF "is one of the most pleasant and straightforward development companies" he's ever worked with.

Looking at the cavernous 100-by-650 foot fabrication floor, with five bright-yellow cranes that can carry 55,000 tons each and noting that ADF also made sophisticated steel pieces for the Freedom Tower memorial at ground zero in New York, Doney said, "Look at this plant. ADF does things right."

State Rep. Jean Price, D-Great Falls, was impressed by the size of the plant and its future job implications.

"This will be really good for Great Falls job creation," she said, adding she hopes it will mean work for graduates of Great Falls College-Montana State University's expanded welding and construction programs.

Dean Stoller, 20, who graduated from the welding program last spring, said he has landed a job as a welder's helper at ADF as he gains more proficiency.

He said he is excited about a possible career at ADF.

"I worked on a couple of small projects for local shops, but nothing like this," he said.

At the end of the talks, two lead technicians put the two of the big cranes to use, bringing a large steel beam made in Quebec together with one made in Great Falls and bolting them together, symbolizing the partnership between business people of the two countries.